President Bush has signed the Act that you'll see referenced below that makes the deposit of government-funded health research mandatory! As you might possibly remember, the requirement that investigators using NIH money deposit their manuscipts into PubMed Central (PMC) within 12 months after publication that went into effect in 2005 as a result of the efforts of Dr. Elias Zerhouni, Director of the National Institutes of Health, was not mandatory. Dr. Zerhouni wanted it to be mandatory, but lobbyists for medical publishers watered it down until the enacting language was changed from "required" to "recommended". As a result only abvout 5% to 7% of such manuscipts have been available via PubMed Central since 2005. But with this Consolidated Appropriations Act the language is now changed to "required". This is analogous to the release of publically-funded education research via ERIC. It doesn't happen often, but we've won one! We should now all start offering training in PMC to our academic and public library customers.

Link to PubMed Central--
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/sites/entrez?db=pmc